It is spring in the Balkans, a season of planting and ploughing and political revisionism. Western analysts are spewing reports declaring the NATO campaign a success; the place is being rebuilt, they say. One million roof tiles have been distributed, thousands of people have got medical help from Kfor and mines have been cleared from 16,000 houses and 1,250 miles of road.
Humanitarian organisations, at least some of them, are less enthusiastic and certainly less optimistic for the future. UNICEF this week called Yugoslavian children the most endangered in Europe. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says it is still too dangerous in Kosovo to try to return the 250,000 Serb refugees who fled after June. For now, they must join the 600,000 Serb refugees from Bosnia and Croatia who are still wandering the Balkans.
Journalists sift through the rhetoric, some searching futilely for reliable statistics to provide a context for on-the-ground impressions.
In many ways, the world's attention seems elsewhere. The nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan are more urgent; news of elections and disasters in Africa are even making it on to the news pages. The Middle East continues to be the hot spot.
So what of Kosovo, of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic? What of a 78-day air war that achieved at least two things: the cessation of Serbian oppression against ethnic Albanians in the province and the showering of toxic-depleted uranium from bombs all over Yugoslavian soil and water?
Let us go back a few years to refresh memories. The Kosovo province, a land of some 1.3 million that borders Macedonia and Albania as well as the southern Yugoslavian province of Serbia, has long been a disputed region.
Serbs claim it as their historical and religious heartland. Ethnic Albanians, who are Muslim, claim it as their homeland for the last several hundred years, at least. The Albanians have certainly been the majority here for a long time, comprising some 80 to 90 per cent of the population, with the remainder mixed among Serbs, Roma, and Bosniacs. Ethnic tensions were simply not permitted to exist under Josef Tito, the Communist strongman whose reign ended in 1974. In fact, his Brotherhood and Unity policy simply repressed hatreds.
In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic facilitated his rise to power by revoking the autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed, ostensibly to protect the Serb minority, who were suffering at the hands of the Albanian majority. What followed was a decade of a reversal of the freedoms the Albanians had enjoyed. In 1998, a loosely organised guerrilla group emerged, armed and uniformed, calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army. Its war with the Serbian paramilitaries and Yugoslavian Army escalated. A Serb massacre of civilians in the Kosovo village of Racak is widely considered to have been the last straw for the West, and the impetus for the NATO campaign.
Now, as the snow on mountains ringing Kosovo melts, nearly all the 750,000 to one million Albanian refugees who fled during the NATO campaign have returned. Many were stripped of all their belongings and valuables by the Serbs, their identity documents seized, their cars and tractors shorn of licence plates.
What have they returned to? What does this place - nearly empty a year ago, visibly populated then only by uniformed Serb soldiers patrolling streets of wrecked shops and deserted and fire-blackened homes - look like now? What has replaced the sounds of air-raid sirens and gunfire and bombs hitting their marks?
A few scenes . . .
It is midday in the centre of Pristina, the Kosovo capital. The streets are crowded with pedestrians, the streets clogged with coughing and dusty cars, bumper to bumper. Not far from here, the city's massive sports stadium, once a symbol of ethnic coexistence under Tito, burned a few weeks ago, due, apparently, to faulty electrical wiring. It is now a twisted, blackened shell that looms over the city. Surrounding the stadium are tented and open market stalls, selling just about anything one could want. There are Honda generators, petrol in plastic bottles, garden hoses, Nike jackets, German car parts, door knobs, socks and jumpers. Boxes display fresh produce from Greece and elsewhere, oranges and potatoes and onions and kiwi fruit. There are walls of cigarette cartons; a pack sells for DM1.50.
Even during the NATO campaign, the traffic signals usually worked. Now they do not. Serbs used to operate the so-called infrastructure here, the water supply and the power plants. They somehow got the creaky stuff to work. The Albanians were largely unfamiliar with it and international engineers have found much of the ancient equipment baffling. Without traffic signals, chaos is reigning at this particular intersection. An American UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) policeman in a blue uniform is screaming at cars to stop. He is waving his arms madly, cursing, his face red. At his side stands a young woman in a Kosovo Protection Corp uniform, the group that is currently being trained to become Kosovo's police force. She is watching him, learning how to be a police officer.
A small, red car fails to obey the UNMIK's officer's shouted command to stop. Finally, the driver halts.
"What the f . . . are you doing?" screams the UNMIK policeman. He grabs his gun from his holster and aims it at the driver. "Get out of the car now!"
When the driver with the gun pointed at his head hesitates, the UNMIK officer slams the gun on the hood and shouts the command again. The driver opens the door.
"Give me your keys," the officer shouts. The driver complies, and the officer takes the keys and throws them some 50 feet away into the street. "There's your keys, you "f . . . ing idiot," shouts the officer, stomping away.
The incident has captured the attention of all those stuck in traffic. It has done nothing, of course, to alter the gridlock. A young police trainee has just been taught to point a gun at someone who commits a traffic violation.
Another scene. In a neighbourhood in the hills above Pristina, some 15 Serb families huddle in their homes. "No, they never leave," says an Albanian who lives on the street. "They cannot. They would be shot or beaten." Once a week the Serbs are escorted by British soldiers to do their grocery shopping.
In Mitrovica, an 80-year-old woman is one of 15 Serbs remaining on the southern side of the River Ibar, which used to be mixed Serb and Albanian. She refuses to leave her home, to join her family in Vovojdina, in the north of Yugoslavia. A veteran of the second World War, she fought the Nazis and she is not about to give up now, even though a nearby Serb man was hacked to death with an axe by an Albanian just weeks ago. Now, at night, she sits outside her house in a lawn chair beside a box of rocks. French soldiers escort her to do her shopping, but worry they will not be able to protect her.
In Suva Reka, where several mass graves were found after the war, it is market day, and the streets are crowded. A convoy of 1,100 US marines is making its way across town as part of a planned show of NATO strength during the next week. Children wave and people smile at the Kfor troops, a response that is nearly universal among the Albanians here. Many Albanian homes sport posters and calendars depicting President Clinton. Many call the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, "Mother".
Still, the UN agreement that brought an end to the war here called for a dismantling and disarming of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose goal is complete independence for the province, which is still, on paper, under the rule of Belgrade. On the ground, with red Albanian flags flying from buildings and homes and cars, this already looks like an independent state. All the maps have been changed from Serbian placenames to Albanian, which can lead to confusion among aid workers as well as Kfor. Srbica is now Skenderaj; Pec, site of one of the holiest of Serb monasteries, is now Peje. Street signs, which used to have Serbian and Albanian spellings, have been altered, with Serb names blacked out.
Despite the agreement, two KLA soldiers, still wearing their outlawed uniforms, stand in the street in Suva Reka as the Kfor troops pass by.
William Hayden is a field officer in Skenderjai at the OSCE (the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe). He has worked in the Balkans since 1994. Like other OSCE staff, he left Kosovo on March 19th, 1999, just before the air war began. He returned in June. He is eager to leave in October and says he is finished with this work.
"This is not working. This is not Bosnia. The UN agreement is idealistic, but it is not realistic. In Bosnia we had some kind of agreement between the parties. We do not have that here. What is the rule of law? Which law governs? Is this still a part of Yugoslavia?" he said. "Our local partners do not think so. Take the Albanian judges now. They want to try Serb war criminals. They are not interested in trying cases against people in their own community. So we have rising crime, a large drug problem, even reports of organ theft. But the judges are not interested in that.
"There is no framework and without a framework, historically, setting up a civil society does not work. We are working against history here."
Perhaps, but the big picture is that the place is relatively quiet for the moment. If there is attention to the region, it is turning to the political fortunes of Mr Milosevic, who seems to be more entrenched than ever, and determined to prevent further erosion of Yugoslavia.
In fact, as Kosovo seems hopeless, thwarted, filled with hatreds but relatively stable, interest is shifting to Montenegro, the Western-leaning Yugoslavian republic that many say will be the next source of contention.
A few Western reporters were not in Kosovo this week; they were apartment hunting in Montenegro.
Series concluded
